Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Joey’s father gave a long, noisy sigh, leaned his head back, and looked at the ceiling.

  “My dad doesn’t think it’s going to happen,” Joey said. “He’s not in my body so he doesn’t know what I can do.”

  “You’re right, son,” his father said. “I’m not in your body. And I wish I were so we could trade and you could play football.”

  “You couldn’t play football now, Papa.”

  “You never know. Maybe I could,” his father said, and I was glad to see my father lean in and engage Mr. Buckley in a conversation about football at Alabama.

  “Are you scared?” Joey asked.

  “Nope. What about you?”

  “I don’t get scared,” he said. “I’ve had polio a long time, since I was eight years old, so now I won’t look like I have it anymore, right?”

  “Right,” I said, and I believed him.

  “I got this from my cousin Pete, who’s worse off than me. He’ll never walk, that’s what the doctor told his mother. He can’t even come to Warm Springs because it wouldn’t do him a bit of good.”

  “I got it when I was one, so I don’t know how I caught it.”

  He was looking at me, and I could tell he wanted to ask me a question but didn’t know exactly how to do it.

  “I don’t smoke, if that’s what you were wondering,” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I checked his legs. I wanted to ask him if he really couldn’t walk.

  He was sitting in a leather and aluminum wheelchair, quite a spiffy one, and wearing two long leg braces, unlocked so his knees bent. On the back of the chair he had a set of crutches attached by a leather band.

  “So you can walk,” I said, indicating the crutches.

  “A little with crutches but not so good. I can stand if I lock my braces,” he said, “and I can swing my legs on crutches but not for long.” He lifted one leg and locked the brace. “So my dad would say I can’t really walk.”

  “I guess most kids here can’t.”

  “Looks like that,” he said. “And you can, right?”

  I drew a deep breath.

  “Actually,” I said quietly, so my parents couldn’t hear and have to speak to me later about lying, which my mother would certainly have done, “I look like I’m a lot better off than I really am.”

  I decided to ask for a wheelchair before I left the waiting room.

  Suddenly, after years of longing to walk with ease and run and skate and ride a bike, I had changed my mind. I wanted to arrive in the room where I’d be living for months pushing a wheelchair.

  When the admissions nurse called our name, my mother and I sat down across from her. She was reading my chart.

  “Paralytic polio in 1941?”

  I nodded.

  “Susan Richards, age eleven. Washington, D.C. 3458 Macomb Street.” She looked up from the chart. “Referred by Dr. Something-or-other, I can’t read his name, at the Cleveland Clinic. You’re here for a stabilization of the right ankle, muscle transplants, et cetera, et cetera. Have you seen Dr. Iler?”

  “We haven’t,” my mother said. “We just arrived last night by car.”

  “Could you stand up and let me take a look at you?” the nurse asked.

  I stood up.

  “Walk.”

  I walked a little way from the desk with the halting kangaroo jump I used for moving back and forth. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Joey Buckley watching me.

  “Just for the records,” she said.

  “What’s for the records?” my mother asked.

  “That I asked to see her walk. Most of our patients don’t walk. Or rarely, they have paralysis in their arms and shoulders and can walk but not manipulate their arms or hands.” She gave me a smile, and I’m sure she meant it nicely, but I took her gesture as combative.

  “Lucky girl,” she said.

  “When do I get my own wheelchair?” I asked.

  “Your own?” The nurse shook her head. “The wheelchairs you see in the waiting room belong to children who need them at home.”

  Looking across at me, she must have sensed my longing to be like everybody else.

  “Thank your lucky stars,” she said in her deep southern drawl, “you don’t need a wheelchair.”

  My mother was always calm, especially in emergencies, and although this wasn’t an emergency, I was grateful for the softness of her voice, the absence of general tension, which she concealed with too much success for her own good.

  But she knew I was working myself into a state. At some level, she must have known that I didn’t want to walk into a place where I’d be living for a long time without having the right equipment.

  My mother leaned over the desk, her hand on the top of it, her voice quizzical.

  “You seem to have some old wheelchairs lined up against the wall,” she said to the nurse.

  The nurse’s head shot up.

  “We do,” she said.

  “I wonder if we could borrow one.”

  “For what?” the nurse asked, handing papers to sign across her desk.

  “For my daughter,” my mother said. She gave no other explanation.

  “Your daughter doesn’t need a wheelchair,” the nurse said, giving my mother a look.

  There was a moment of silence while my mother signed the papers and handed them back to the nurse, and then a significant pause. My mother was excellent at silence. We were accustomed to the power of her silence at home.

  “She actually does need a wheelchair,” my mother said softly.

  An orderly brought a large wooden and wicker wheelchair and I sat in it, squiggled into the back of the seat so my legs stuck straight out, and my mother wheeled me over to the chairs where my father sat with Jeffrey talking to Mr. Buckley.

  “We’re ready,” she said to my father.

  “Where’d you get the wheelchair?” Joey asked.

  “I’m trying it out,” I said.

  “It’s too big for you.”

  He reached into the corner of his wheelchair and pulled out a baseball cap with ALABAMA in red letters.

  “This is the school where I’m going to play ball if I get well,” he said. “You can have it if you want.”

  At Home in Second Medical

  I WATCHED MY ROOMMATE tilt her body cast forward so she could eat. I was trying not to talk to her because she had asked me to be quiet, to please be quiet, but I couldn’t bear the silence.

  “I don’t like the grits, do you?” I asked.

  “The grits are fine,” she said without looking up.

  The room was hot and she had nothing on but a sheet thrown over the back of her and a body cast that went from her chest to her feet in a kind of U, so her legs curved up toward her back, and her legs were separated by a pole. She could be turned on her back, but mainly she was on her stomach, sideways across the bed, her elbows resting for support on a metal table. She was in the body cast after surgery on her back, which had been done in the hope that she’d be able to sit up without a back brace.

  Her name was Caroline Slover. She was also eleven, and she grew up in a small town in the center of Illinois. She had had polio in fourth grade, when she was nine, and almost died. I knew that from her mother, Mrs. Slover, who delivered the information without emotion, including the part about dying, because Caroline didn’t talk about it.

  “She’ll say nothing about polio, ever,” Mrs. Slover said.

  We had been living together for three days, and so far I had done all of the talking while Caroline stared out the window or at the wall behind my bed, at a photograph of a field of sunflowers, or read Nancy Drew. She would answer if I asked her a simple impersonal question, and I struggled to think of questions like that to begin a conversation that at least was a facsimile of friendship.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said to my mother.

  “Nothing,” my mother said. “Nothing you can do but wait.”

  Caroline didn’t like me. She came to that decision
when I first wheeled my oversized wooden and wicker wheelchair into the room I’d be sharing with her and said hi and told her my name. I could feel the animosity like a pop in her corner of the room.

  “I can’t wait,” I told my mother. “I need to fix it right away before you leave.”

  I had a list of things that needed to be accomplished in the next month before my mother left. In my mind it was simply a list of important things that had nothing to do with the fear of my mother’s leaving or the need to establish a stockade of safety around me. If asked, I would have said, “I’m perfectly fine.”

  I don’t think this was a passive way of saying one thing and meaning the opposite. Insofar as I’m able to sort out the child I was from what I know about that child now, I believed at the time that I was capable of dealing with anything that came my way. My mother had told me that.

  “Bad things happen to everyone,” she’d tell me, recounting the various misfortunes in the lives of people we knew—sinus conditions, the death of parents, automobile accidents, cancer of the voice box, blindness. “You are fine.”

  Caroline and I were in the room alone, too early in the morning for visitors. My mother was at the hotel with my father and Jeffrey, who had come down with a virus. Caroline’s mother was at one of the cottages, which she had rented from the foundation so she could be with Caroline through her surgeries. My mother planned to share the cottage with her for the month she was with me.

  “I guess you know I’m having surgery tomorrow morning,” I said to Caroline after the nurse had taken our breakfast trays away.

  “Everyone has surgery in Second Medical,” Caroline said.

  I slipped off the bed into the wheelchair I’d be using after the surgery and wheeled over to the door.

  What I wanted to do was go down the corridor, past the Girls’ Ward, past the nurses’ station to the other end of Second Medical, where the boys lived, and find Joey Buckley. But the hall was full of nurses and orderlies and stretchers, and a priest was headed in my direction.

  I pulled my wheelchair back inside the door.

  Caroline was reading, her blond wavy hair falling across her cheek separating us like a curtain.

  I watched her concentrate on her book as if I weren’t in the room, as if I didn’t exist.

  “So there’s a priest coming to our room,” I said.

  But she was deep into Nancy Drew.

  I wanted to win her over. I didn’t know why it was so important to me, since there was no sign of future friendship from her. Perhaps I was less interested in the friendship than in capturing her attention, but those lines were foggy to me then.

  I think about friendship and sometimes wonder even now: Who is this person I bring with me into a room or a conversation or a party, into a friendship? I think of myself as warm and open in ways that I wasn’t when I was younger. A loose cannon then, full of energy and determination and unbridled enthusiasm.

  But something was missing then and is missing still. It has taken years in this profession of writing, which brings me face to face with my own image, to recognize how much distance I keep between myself and other people. And why?

  After my father died, when I was in my twenties, people came back from the funeral to our house, people from every corner of his world, and I was standing at the front door when one of his oldest friends approached and took me aside. I was so glad to see him, so eager to hear what he might say about my father, since so many of the people who came through the door were strangers to me. I imagined that this man would tell me a secret about my father, to keep as a nugget with things I’d missed knowing about him, since he died young. What he said astonished me.

  “I just have to tell you now that for thirty years I knew your father.” His voice was thick with emotion. “And I hardly knew him.”

  And twelve years later, at my mother’s funeral, sitting at the graveside next to my stepfather, a dear, gentle, military-minded man. He was so different from my father that my brother and I were astounded by her choice.

  “I loved your mother,” he said, turning to me with tears running down his cheeks. “But I hardly knew her.”

  Those two stories rest together in my mind as a matched set. I was my parents’ daughter.

  The priest came in the door, rushing in as if blown by a light wind, tousling Caroline’s hair, pulling up the chair at the end of my bed, and sitting down next to my wheelchair.

  “I’m on my surgery rounds,” he said, “and you’re new and having surgery tomorrow, and you just got here on Monday.”

  He had a wonderful face, angular, of high color, a sharp nose, water-blue eyes, thinning blond hair. A kind, all-around sparkle, as if he’d been sprinkled with glitter. I was breathless in his presence.

  “I’m having a stabilization tomorrow,” I said. “Do you know that operation?”

  “I do, I do. Dr. Irwin will do your stabilization, and he’s a genius at this operation. Boom, boom, and it’s done. Zip, zip, and you’re sewed up. A new cast, a little blood, a little pain, and you’re off and running. Right, Caroline?”

  They both laughed, and I was surprised that Caroline didn’t seem to mind the kind of wild energy this priest brought into the room.

  “This is your first visit at Warm Springs, isn’t it,” he said.

  “And maybe it will be my last,” I said.

  “Maybe so. You never know, but you’ll have to come to Mass on Sundays.” He reached over and ran his hand down the side of my cheek. I must have shivered. He had sealed my love for him with that gesture.

  “It doesn’t matter what religion you are or if you’re no religion at all. Just come. It’s a pretty ceremony, with incense and wafers and wine and music. And besides, there isn’t a lot to do on Sundays at Warm Springs.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out a tiny book, about the size of a fifty-cent piece, with a brown cover and real pages and writing on the pages that I couldn’t read. “This is from Italy. I got it in Florence. Now you have a good-luck piece for tomorrow.”

  “How did you know I’d be here?” I asked.

  “I knew,” he said.

  Then he got up, stood next to Caroline’s bed, leaned on his folded arms, and spoke to her quietly so I couldn’t hear what he was saying. But her head was turned toward him and she was smiling.

  I put the little book in the pocket of my blouse, aware that I was trembling, a kind of all-over electric tremble. Not like a shiver down my back; more pervasive and unsettling than a shiver.

  “So I’ll see you some Sunday,” he called as he left.

  I went to the door and watched him walk down the corridor, stopping in every room.

  “Who is that?” I asked Caroline.

  “Father James,” she said. “He’s Catholic.”

  “Do you go to Mass on Sundays?”

  “I’m Protestant,” she said, “and I go to nothing.”

  I added Mass to my mental list.

  I loved the ceremony of religion and played it as if it were a game that delighted me in all its permutations. I think my attraction to religion had to do with theater, though I liked the idea of God, not an angry God or even a benevolent one, but a God like the wind, with sufficient force to lift a small girl into the air until she was weightless.

  My parents both came from religious families but were nonbelievers with no intention of raising their children in the church in any formal way. My mother described to me the painful hours spent on her knees as a young girl with her Methodist grandfather, and my father grew up with Quakers and Lutherans. He was more Quaker than Lutheran himself, but in general he was nothing at all. When I was very young, I loved Quaker Meeting at Sidwell Friends because the head of the school pretended to have a flea in his ear that represented the Inner Light. At Meeting, when the Inner Light—we never called it God—moved him to speak, he’d take the flea out of his ear and the flea would tell us a story about one thing or another, probably a moral story. That was a long time before Harold Ickes a
nd I remembered those early Meetings as pure magic.

  We lived very close to the National Cathedral in Washington, best known for its presidential prayer services and memorial services. The grounds were gorgeously hilly, almost the highest point of the swampy city, with woods and a creek and bridges. There were three Episcopal schools on the property, and playgrounds where I played when I was growing up, a time of relative safety and freedom. I often went to the Bishop’s Garden and into the massive cathedral itself, which housed not only the Episcopalians but other religions too.

  My particular discovery was the Greek Orthodox church that held services in the crypt of the cathedral. I find it hard to believe now, having raised children in a different time, that I used to wander around the crypt of the cathedral alone. But I did. At about the same time, my mother, who liked the Episcopal Church in the abstract because of its connection to the Church of England, and she liked England, decided I should go to Sunday school at St. Albans Episcopal Church, which was also on the grounds of the cathedral.

  I hated the Sunday school, but in no time at all I was skipping it to attend the Greek Orthodox service in the crypt. My parents would leave Jeffrey with Grandma Richards, drop me off at St. Albans, and then head to the diner for breakfast. I would wave goodbye to them, go through the front door of St. Albans, pass the schoolrooms where I was virtually unknown, leave by the back door, and cut across the close to the cathedral. By the time my parents returned from the diner, I was waiting in front of St. Albans where they had let me off. They never asked me how I’d liked Sunday school. I assume they were surprised that I continued to look forward to Sunday mornings, but this secret was one among many of the silences between us.

  I was small for my age and traveling alone, but as I remember it no one ever stopped me to ask what I was doing in the cavernous cathedral, descending the precarious winding marble steps into the crypt, stopping at the door to the Greek Orthodox service to light my candles for the dead. I used my money for a St. Albans offering to buy candles for the living—one for my parents, one for Jeffrey, and one for General Beauregard. Sometimes I left out General Beauregard, but more often I left out Grandma Richards, because I didn’t have enough money for both and had to choose between them.